Glosses and commentaries

Already in Late Antiquity, to sit in a class meant to read a text (lectio) under the guidance of a teacher. The notes of the teacher sometimes survive in the form of glosses (loose notes) or a full commentary, treating different aspects of the text.

On the page, these notes and commentaries were organised around the text in particular fashions: the lay-out varies in relation to the extent of the commentary.

Organized lay-out

The page can be very well organized: neat spaces in the margin and in between the lines offer space to enter notes and glosses that are copied from one manuscript to the next. Marks link the note in the margin to the specific place in the main text to which it belongs.

Dialiectica

Tied notes

Manuscript info

opening of book 4 on Dialectica
About the manuscript
Leiden VLF 48
More about the manuscript VLF 48
Source

opening of book 4 on Dialectica

Here you can see how each marginal note is neatly tied to its correct place in the main text with a tie mark

Messy lay-out

Pages can also be completely overgrown with glosses and notes.Notes can end up on the wrong page, or be added on separate inserted slips of parchment. A page can be so densely glossed that it is difficult to see where one note ends, and the other begins, or to which phrase they belong

Paris, BnF, lat. 12949 f.24v
Source: Gallica

Here you can see how a little ‘Porphyrian tree’ has been added in the inner margin even when there was hardly space
Source: Gallica

Here you can see how a later reader added large ‘NOTA’ signs as tiemarks, to clear up the puzzle of where to place the gloss.
Source: Gallica

Here you can see how a first reader went really fancyfull with inventing a new tiemark, and how a later reader drew a line between text and gloss to mark them off a bit more clearly
Source: Gallica

Heavily of lightly glossed

On the page, a wealth of notes can be added, but also just a few. This can even vary per page: in the same manuscript, one page is completely filled, while the other is empty.Typically, the first (few) pages are heavily annotated, but this activity then dies out quickly.

Opening page of Aristotle’s Categories in Paris, BnF, Lat. 2788 (ca. 1000), f. 49r
Source: Gallica

What do the notes do?

In modern information theory, good information management ought to strive for four goals, the four s’s of information management: store, sort, select and summarize information (Ann M. Blair, Too much to know, p. 3) In medieval manuscripts, these four s’s are also happening in the margins. The notes are there, generally speaking, to help the reader, and storing, sorting, selecting and summarizing are important strategies.

In manuscripts, marginal notes are used to:

Call attention to certain things:

Summarize and highlight the structure of the text Afbeelding ontbreekt

Explain and expand:

a gloss about ‘eloquentia’ (eloquence) in Leiden, UB, VLF 12 part 3 (f. 27r)
Source: eigen foto

Refer to different authorities and compare:

References to other authorities in VLF 48. In the bubbles: references to Augustine, Boethius, Plato, Pythagoras, Pliny.
Source: Universiteits Bibliotheek Leiden

Visualize material in lists, diagrams and schemes:

Schemes and diagrams in Paris, BnF, lat. 12949
Source: Gallica

Give the reader some guidance in how to interpret certain things: Afbeelding ontbreekt

Next read: Debates and controversies